This nation is facing a $15 trillion national debt, and there is no shortage of opinions about how to move toward deficit reduction in the federal budget. One topic you will not hear discussed very often on Capitol Hill is the idea of ending one of the oldest American welfare programs -- the extraordinary amount of corporate welfare going to the nuclear energy industry.
Many in Congress talk of getting 'big government off the back of private industry.' Here's an industry we'd like to get off the backs of the taxpayers.
As a senator who is the longest-serving independent in Congress, and as the president of an independent and non-partisan budget watchdog organization, we do not necessarily agree on everything when it comes to energy and budget policy in the United States. But one thing we strongly agree on is the need to end wasteful subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry. After 60 years, this industry should not require continued and massive corporate welfare. It is time for the nuclear power industry to stand on its own two feet.
Nuclear welfare started with research and development. According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, since 1948 the federal government has spent more than $95 billion (in 2011 dollars) on nuclear energy R&D. That is more than four times the amount spent on solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biofuels, and hydropower combined.
But federal R&D was not enough; the industry also wanted federal liability insurance too, which it got back in 1957 with the Price-Anderson Act. This federal liability insurance program for nuclear plants was meant to be temporary, but Congress repeatedly extended it, most recently through 2025. Price-Anderson puts taxpayers on the hook for losses that exceed $12. 6 billion if there is a nuclear plant disaster. When government estimates show the cost for such a disaster could reach $720 billion in property damage alone, that's one sweetheart deal for the nuclear industry!
R&D and Price-Anderson insurance are still just the tip of the iceberg. From tax breaks for uranium mining and loan guarantees for uranium enrichment to special depreciation benefits and lucrative federal tax breaks for every kilowatt hour from new plants, nuclear is heavily subsidized at every phase. The industry also bilks taxpayers when plants close down with tax breaks for decommissioning plants. Further, it is estimated that the federal costs for the disposal of radioactive nuclear waste could be as much as $100 billion.
Even with all of those subsidies, the private sector still will not agree to finance a new nuclear plant, so wealthy nuclear corporations recently secured access to $18.5 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees. Maybe the Wall Street banks agree with the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated the risk of default on nuclear loans at above 50 percent. The nuclear industry's financial troubles are not new. In the 1960's and 1970's, 100 reactors were cancelled due to cost overruns. Things were so bad Forbes called it "the largest managerial disaster in business history." Despite this history, some want to dramatically increase federal loan guarantees for nuclear plants.
It is shocking that the nuclear industry continues to receive so much federal support at a time of record debt. Of course nuclear subsidies benefit some of the wealthiest and most powerful energy corporations in America, which may explain the persistence of nuclear welfare.
For example, Exelon, which takes in $33 billion in revenue annually, is the leading operator/owner of nuclear reactors in the United States. Entergy, with revenues of more than $11 billion annually, is the second largest. Together, these two companies own or operate almost one-third of U.S. reactors, and based on their revenue they are doing pretty well. Why do they need endless federal welfare for their industry year after year after year? Will it ever end?
Well, as Secretary of Energy Steven Chu confirmed at a recent Senate hearing, without federal liability insurance and loan guarantees, no one would ever build a new nuclear plant. Whether you support nuclear energy or not, we should all be able to agree that with record debt, we cannot afford to continue to subsidize this mature industry and its multi-billion dollar corporations. If the nuclear industry believes so fervently in their technology, then they and Wall Street investors can put their money where the mouth is. Let's let them finance it, insure it, and pay for it themselves.
Follow Sen. Bernie Sanders on Twitter: www.twitter.com/senatorsanders
Mike Lux: Most Conservative Congress in How Long?
Their antiquated design (over 50 years old) dooms them to low efficiency with relatively large amounts of high-level waste generated.
No re-processing of this waste will ever be allowed, thanks to proliferation concerns.
There are designs that are more efficient, with much less waste, but good luck ever getting them approved to be built in the U.S. with our NIMBY attitude.
It did happen at Fukushima
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/videos-moderated-prompt-criticality.html
and here is an email i got from Gunderson (nuke expert) on same topic
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/gundersen-email-and-theories.html
Do you even know what a prompt criticality is, Ish?
If you want nuclear to stand on its own, stay out of the courts. Lawyers are expensive and its your own doing that keeps it high capital costs.
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/reliableandaffordableenergy/graphicsandcharts/uselectricityproductioncostsandcomponents/
more expensive and slower to install than solar wind and waste.
cancer and nuclear war. That's nukes.
The Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan had five unplanned shutdowns last year. It's one of the area's biggest employers, and its safety record is one of the worst in the country. Now it's trying to prove to federal regulators that it can meet their standards.
...........The "this" Wagaman refers to is a series of safety problems at the plant last year. Palisades unexpectedly shut down five different times, and during four of those shutdowns, the nuclear reactor stopped.
Federal regulators say such unexpected shutdowns are not common. There are more than 100 nuclear power plants in the U.S., and the plant's owner, Entergy Nuclear, owns 10 others. Palisades is one of only four plants in the U.S. with such a bad safety rating.
That poor record scares Maynard Kaufman, who lives with his wife on a small farm 11 miles inland.
"If you just have one accident, and [even] if it were only one in a million, it is a cost that we don't want to have to bear," he said............
...... But one night last September, a worker did not follow the procedure after getting permission from a supervisor. As a result, an electrical circuit shorted out, and the control room lost power to half its indicators. That incident was the most significant safety violation at Palisades last year...........
http://www.michiganradio.org/post/return-safety-first-michigan-nuclear-plant
Safety is nice.
Buy them out, shut them down.
(Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999)
The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Is Far From Over
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-alvarez/the-fukushima-nuclear-dis_b_1444146.html
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-lots-of-ifs-in-missouri-s-latest-nuclear-gambit/article_e795ae6b-4544-5a13-a950-13ec99a63b4d.html
On Thursday, Gov. Jay Nixon and executives from Ameren and nuclear-industry giant Westinghouse announced a grand plan to seek a $452 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the next generation of nuclear reactors: small, modular units that produce about 225 megawatts of power compared to the 1,000-megawatt monsters now in disfavor.
If Westinghouse gets the grant, it says it intends to design and build the first units for use at Ameren's Callaway County plant, working with researchers at the University of Missouri's engineering programs in Columbia and Rolla, thus planting the seeds for a multi-billion-dollar industry based right here in the Show-Me State.
If a chunk of that $452 million is spent in Missouri, it would be a welcome boost to the state's economy.
The key word here is "if."
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-lots-of-ifs-in-missouri-s-latest-nuclear-gambit/article_e795ae6b-4544-5a13-a950-13ec99a63b4d.html#ixzz1snfesDOr
continued
Many of us who have been following the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi have also been paying attention to what the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been doing to respond. A preliminary report was released last year highlighting the weaknesses in U.S. nuclear plants identified by the events at Fukushima.
Yet when NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko tried to spur action in the form of new regulations related to risks from earthquakes, flooding, lousy designs, lousier engineering, corner-cutting and negligent-to-nonexistent maintenance, the other four industry-connected commissioners staged a coup d’etat and took their war with Jaczko to the U.S. Congress.
http://enformable.com/2012/04/nrc-kabuki-gets-senate-curtain-call/
Jaczko was conducting political maneuvering. Plain and simple.
Enformable is a koolaid site.
Like many other countries upping their renewable energy game, Japan is pulling out all the stops to encourage new growth from solar and wind power. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan has to find other alternative energy solutions to nuclear, and is proposing a new feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme to encourage solar and wind investment. The new policy will go into action in July and could have very positive implications solar development, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The Japanese government has proposed rates that will make renewable investment in Japan a very attractive opportunity. According to Bloomberg, the proposed FIT rates could bring equity returns as high as 44 percent for solar projects and 51 percent for wind projects. Rates that good will likely bring in a lot of project proposals, but the actual development will depend on Japan’s planning regime, which Bloomberg notes could be conservative.
With that in mind, we could see Japan with a wind and solar capacity of 20 gigawatts (GW) by 2014, over 10 GW of which Bloomberg estimates will be from new solar installations. Based on current costs, such growth would require investments close to $37.5 billion over the next three years. If Japan follows Bloomberg’s projected growth, it could become the third-largest solar market in the world by 2014.
http://www.earthtechling.com/2012/04/feed-in-tariff-sets-up-japan-solar-for-growth/
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/science/2012/04/22/chasing-fusion.html
Let me know what ja' think.
On April 13, 2012 EnviroReporter.com tested Nori seaweed from Japan bought in a West Los Angeles store, the same one where this reporter bought the identical item eight months ago soon after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns began in Japan. The trendy and ‘organic’ delicacy, popular with LA hipsters, was 94.7% above normal, 17.6% of that additional ionization indicative of alpha radiation which can be 60 to 1,000 times more dangerous than beta and gamma radiation.
These tests were performed with an Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor, the same detector EnviroReporter.com has used in over 1,500 tests for Fukushima radiation beginning four days after the March 11, 2011 triple meltdowns at the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi six-reactor complex in Japan.
Nori seaweed is considered a delicacy and consumed upon eating sushi wrapped in it or straight out of the bag in thin green squares like the product purchased by EnviroReporter.com. This kind of seaweed can be purchased at nearly 50 Japanese and Japanese-American stores in Southern California as well as in about 900 Japanese restaurants and sushi bars throughout the Southland.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30459
Full article-http://www.enviroreporter.com/2012/04/japanese-seaweed-radiation-doubles/
In the summer of 2010, a Navajo cattle rancher named Larry Gordy stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the middle of his grazing land and figured he had better call in the feds. Engineers from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived a few months later, Geiger counters in hand, and found radioactivity levels that buried the needles on their equipment.
The abandoned mine here, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon, joins the list of hundreds of such sites identified across the 27,000 square miles of Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico that are the legacy of shoddy mining practices and federal neglect. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the mines supplied critical materials to the nation's nuclear weapons program.
For years, unsuspecting Navajos inhaled radioactive dust and drank contaminated well water. Many of them became sick with cancer and other diseases.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/21/MNR91NT0UU.DTL#ixzz1smnTENQE
For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat says "After one year, typical spent nuclear fuel generates about 10 kW of decay heat per tonne, decreasing to about 1 kW/t after ten years."
So, let's consider ten year old spent fuel. One 1 kW/t is 1 W/kg = 1 J/(s*kg). Since all this heat is produced solely by radioactive decay, it means that radiation inside spent fuel pellets is 1 Gray/s. (In other words, it's still insanely radioactive).
Since after 10 years most short-lived isotopes have decayed, most of this radioactivity is caused by 30-year half-life isotopes Cs-137 and Sr-90 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield). Sr-90 is pure beta emitter, so if fuel is intact, it goes not give off much gammas. Gammas are mostly from Cs-137.
Very roughly, we can assume that about half of the radiation is produced by gamma-active Cs-137. Decay energy of Cs-137 is 1.176 MeV. 1 MeV is 1.602*10^-13 J. Thus decay energy of one decay is 1.884*10^-13 J. In order to generate 0.5 J/s (0.5 W), how many decays of Cs-137 do we need? About 2.5*10^12.
That's the answer you seek: the gamma activity of intact spent fuel after 10 years cool down is about 2.5 Terabecquerels per kg."
Giving the low-ball estimate from a real physcist, not a poser wannabe.
And make it only what can penetrate from intact rods as opposed from released into the enviroment.
Your source term model is way off. Try running ORIGEN or some professional software.
Idaho Falls, Idaho - The director of the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho has halted all high-risk activities after a 3,000-pound piece of a metal shutter shield fell from a crane near an employee.
John Grossenbacher says the close call on Monday at the complex’s Hot Fuels Examination Facility caused him to suspend work on Wednesday to make sure workers were paying attention to basic safety procedures.
Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/04/21/2490940/nuclear-high-risk-work-halted.html#storylink=cpy
Time for new underwear...........
John Grossenbacher was smart to shut the place down,
... And let everyone get their self together!
Millions are desperate for work,
... We cannot afford,
... Those on the clock to be slacking off for any reason!
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/12/boss-10_J-Wayne-Leonard_WPIV.html
Ha Ha Ha
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/04/19/global-nuclear-markers/
ROFLMAO
South Korea Fuku'ed themselves. It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
South Africa.....always had nuclear for medical isotopes. Or did you know that........?
Never mind, can't teach the ones that have no aptitude for it.
Some are born with the science gene, the rest you hope can read a cookbook (procedure manual).
Still laughing mikie!
ROFLMAO